The Razakars didn’t appear overnight — they were the violent arm of a decades-long plan to keep Hyderabad outside India. IT professional and historian Ratnakar Sadasyula traces the origin of the Razakars to Qasim Rizvi, an Aligarh-educated lawyer from Lucknow who settled in Hyderabad and transformed the pre-existing Majlis party into a paramilitary force dedicated to Islamic supremacy under the Nizam.The background matters: Hyderabad’s majority Hindu population had long suffered under Nizam rule — land grabs, heavy taxation, and systematic exclusion from administration and military. The first organised resistance came from a Dalit woman, Chakali Allamma, whose 4 acres were seized by a local Jamindar. Communist-led revolts spread village by village, directly challenging both the Nizam and his collaborators.Sadasyula’s closing argument is sharp: every community in the world documents the atrocities committed against it — Jews, Armenians, Latvians. Only Indians call it “digging up the past.” He insists this is not progressivism but self-delusion. We cannot confront our history by hiding from it, and unless we name what happened in Hyderabad plainly and repeatedly, we remain trapped in denial.

About the Speaker:
Shri Ratnakar Sadasyula is an IT Professional with a keen interest in History & Indian Culture. He is quite active on X having @SadaaShree handle. He has authored a book on Vijay Nagar Empire called City of Victory – The Rise and Fall of Vijayanagara.